Painting pictures with words. Read the extract below and look at the picture then complete the quizzes on the next slide.
Rubrica: : An image of the effects of the famine in Somalia in 1992, the time at which George Alagiah was reporting from there. This image was taken by Chris Steele-Perkins and shows two emaciated women with their dead children who lie wrapped in cloth on the bare ground.
There was Amina Abdirahman, who had
gone out that morning in search of wild, edible roots, leaving her two young
girls lying on the dirt floor of their hut. They had been sick for days, and
were reaching the final, enervating stages of terminal hunger. Habiba was ten
years old and her sister, Ayaan, was nine. By the time Amina returned,
she had only one daughter. Habiba had died. No rage, no whimpering, just a
passing away — that simple, frictionless, motionless deliverance from a state
of half-life to death itself. It was, as I said at the time in my dispatch, a
vision of ‘famine away from the headlines, a famine of quiet suffering and lonely
death’.
There was the old woman who lay in
her hut, abandoned by relations who were too weak to carry her on their journey
to find food. It was the smell that drew me to her doorway: the smell of
decaying flesh. Where her shinbone should have been there was a festering wound
the size of my hand. She’d been shot in the leg as the retreating army of the
deposed dictator … took revenge on whoever it found in its way. The shattered
leg had fused into the gentle V-shape of a boomerang. It was rotting; she was rotting.
You could see it in her sick, yellow eyes and smell it in the putrid air she
recycled with every struggling breath she took
